Saturday, 22 March 2014

Assassin's Creed Character Design Development

Thought I'd share some development work I did for my latest character design.

I'm a big fan of the 'Assassin's Creed' games and I wanted to create my own character design to fit into that universe. So this should be fun....hopefully...

For a couple of years now, I've been wishing they'd focus a game based
in Victorian London. I think the design of the city, the narrow streets
and tall buildings will be ideal for the main character to scramble
around. The games are also synonymous with history, visiting landmarks,
tweaking bits here and there for story purposes (which I love) and
London is obviously embedded with a deep, rich history. What if our
Assassin was framed for the Jack the Ripper murders? What if he has to
break into Buckingham Palace or Parliament? Or scale to the top of Big
Ben? To me, it's ideal.

So, I decided to focus on the character first. I wanted to create a
great sense of believability with my character's costume. You have to
be able to look at him and instinctively know what time period he's
from. So, pulling in from lots of sources, I had a wealthy amount of
reference material handy...

...a pretty intense amount of research if I'm honest.

One thing I was
concerned about though was the fact that Victorian London people wore a
lot of dark clothing. And the famous white hood of Assassin's Creed
would stand out. HOWEVER, I remembered that the character Ezio wore a
black costumer (in Revelations, I think??) and it just looks...cooler.
So, I'm going to maintain a similar style in my character.

Next up was some character sketches...

I tried to think about my character's costume in a practical manner. I
wanted a lot of his armour and weapons to be concealed for the most
part, so I designed a step by of how his costume layers up (more for my
own sake, than anything else) Firstly, just normal clothing. Second,
protective armour plus weapons. Third, how the coat conceals this. And
finally, fourth, how he looks in 'Assassin' mode.

Similar to how Edward moves in AC: Black Flag, I wanted my character to
have his hood down when the player is just walking around, exploring
etc. But he put's the hood on when moving in restricted areas, or
during main missions.

And here's a step by step development of the character painting...

So, yeah, this is a brief insight into the process I took. But hopefully it will be useful to anyone looking :)